Silent Screaming
by The Other World
Summary: Harry destroyed Tom Riddle's diary in the Chamber of Secrets. No one ever asked Ginny if the destruction of the diary also destroyed Tom Riddle's hold over her soul. Ginny's POV. Oneshot.


**Silent Screaming**

Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter, nor do I make any profits from playing in her sandbox. Also, thanks to Arianna Scribbler for inspiring me with her story, and because she's an awesome writer. If you want to read some good stories, check out her profile!

After the ordeal in the Chamber, her life is turned upside down and absolutely no one notices. Her family coddles her in a way that feels familiar but smothering, and she is vaguely grateful that they care, but they are all trying to comfort someone whose nightmare has passed and has to deal with the aftermath. They don't understand that her nightmare hasn't ended, that the darkness that has permeated her soul for a whole year didn't just end with the stabbing of a diary. Her father mildly reproves her for not understanding that there was something wrong with the diary and she stares at him incredulously - is he blaming her for being taken in by someone who fooled fully grown wizards and witches so completely that the Light almost lost the First Wizarding War? Her mother tries to get her to cook and bake with her to forget the nightmare, and she stares incredulously at her too - she cannot imagine how her mother can believe that would help her at all. Her family notices the changes in her attitude and they treat her with caution, walking on eggshells around her and never mentioning what happened to her, which, in a way, makes it worse than if they had talked about it all the time.

They take her to Egypt when they win the lottery, even when they should have saved the money they so desperately needed, even though they had just visited Romania last year, so that she can be with Bill, who's always been her favorite brother. He's horrified with their tales of her first year; of all of them, he has the most experience with cursed objects, and he looks at her with respect. Respect, not pity - that she has survived intact and mostly whole after being possessed for a whole year by a teenage dark lord. That respect helps her heal a bit, but it's not enough and every day she feels like she's going to shatter into tiny pieces.

She's a Gryffindor, though, and a Weasley, and she puts herself back together and goes on with her life. She's done it rather clumsily, but she's the only person who can see the gaping holes and the hairline cracks, and she improves everyday in hiding them from others and from herself. She smiles and even laughs at the twins' jokes, and she can see the relief on everyone's faces that she's finally getting over it. She isn't though, and she is silent while she screams, she is smiling when she's sobbing inside, and she's together with her family but so, so alone.

Her dreams are chaotic and terrifying in a way they never were before Hogwarts. She dreams of parchment and ink, of dark hair and cool smiles, of the smooth hisses in Parseltongue, but they all end in darkness, in her falling off the cliff into a dark, mad abyss. She wakes up to dark, chilling laughter resonating in her head, drenched in sweat and heart racing so fast that she can't breathe. She learns to hide the dark circles under her eyes with makeup, the sadness in her expression with blazing smiles and witty comments, but somedays she feels so lost that it's unbelievable. Those days she stays in her bed, missing whole days of lessons while she just stares at the canopy of her four poster beds in the Gryffindor tower or her ceiling at the Burrow. Her friends learn to make excuses to her teachers and her family learns to just let her be on those days.

She's lost most of her innocence by the end of her first year, and she sees the world through cynical eyes now. She doesn't trust in authority the way her classmates do. She doesn't even trust in Dumbledore the way her family does because Tom's hatred for Dumbledore doesn't allow her to maintain that naive belief that someone could be completely good and pure. She tries not to be jealous when Ron expresses faith in Dumbledore's abilities, and she understands Percy's estrangement and his anger at their family's naiveté far better than she lets on. She treats him extra coldly to make up for it. For most, the Second War is what takes away their innocence; for Ginny, the War is the confirmation that she desperately needed - that she was right not to give in completely to Tom RIddle's charms, since the world that results under his rule feels wrong and _unnatural_.

Harry is the only person who sympathizes with her, though he is usually so absorbed in his life and in his mysteries that he is mostly oblivious to her. Sick of Harry's brooding after they hear the Order talk about the possibility of Harry being possessed at St. Mungo's, she's the one who brings him out of his funk. For the first time after her first year, she voices openly what happened to her then ("seeing as you don't know anyone but me who's been possessed by You-Know-Who!") and she sees Ron gape at her in disbelief. When Harry says he _forgot_, she feels stabbed in her heart with an icepick. She doesn't let on, of course she doesn't, but it takes her some time to recover from the hurt that Harry, the only person who interacted with the diary, who intimately knows how damaging it can be to be mentally connected to the Dark Lord, could just _forget_ her suffering and heartache. She recovers relatively quickly though, and maybe, just maybe, she might be healing from her experience faster than she knows. The thought feels strange though, almost like a betrayal to her first friend, but she squashes that feeling down _He wasn't my friend, he was a monster, just a monster_. She doesn't believe her own lie, but she's content to ignore the truth and go on with her life. She also ignores her contempt for her weakness - contempt that she is sure stems from the remnants of that diary; how could just destroying the diary completely destroy the hold Tom Riddle had over her soul? But she's accepted the darkness as part of her now, and that gives her relief she had been sure she would never receive, and that she isn't sure she deserves.

She feels despair at Dumbledore's funeral because he was the best hope they had to win, not because she will miss him as a person. She believes in Harry of course, but she would be blind not to see how lost he feels without his mentor and how worried he is for their chances in the war. She is also not an optimist, and though she believes Harry will win the war, it doesn't mean that she and the rest of her family will survive it. Halfway through the service, a savage triumph rises in her chest (_Dumbledore is dead, that old man is defeated at last_) but she's used to these sudden emotions by now and she represses it with the hope that no one saw the cold, dark smile that rose on her face for a moment.

After the funeral, when Harry breaks up with her ("to keep you safe"), she tells him she had known it was coming since Dumbledore's death. She protests half heartedly, but she lets him do it, lets him appease himself that he's done all he can to keep her safe. She knows that their break up is just symbolic, but something still twinges inside her heart. ("I knew you wouldn't be happy unless you were hunting Voldemort") The larger part of her is glad; glad that he cares about her enough to want to protect her, glad that he can sacrifice his happiness for a greater purpose, glad that he, at least, knows what it's like to live with Voldemort overshadowing your life.

Years later, the sight of Voldemort falling, completely defeated, has had the chance to sink in and her happy life with her family and with Harry has created enough light to force the darkness into corners that are constantly shrinking. She still dreams of dark hair, but now it's messy and accompanied with green eyes and red and gold robes. She tells Harry of the darkness that has dominated her for so many years, whose wisps she can still occasionally feel to this day, and when he in turn tells her of the horcrux that had shared _his_ body for sixteen years, they both feel that, at long last, someone understands them deeply. He is the only person she ever tells.

Instead of the violent death she had anticipated for herself, she grows old and eventually half blind. Though her family expects her to be impatient with her slow and rather uneventful days, she relishes the peace that comes when your soul is your own. But as she is passing away, barely two months after Harry slipped away, from some hidden corner in her mind comes the sound of dark, chilling laughter.

A/N: Please review! I have absolutely no idea if this story is any good.


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